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My Journey with Food Part 2

This is the second in a three part series on my journey with food sharing where I started, my turning points and what I practice now. Shared in hopes of helping others that are tired of the food rules, compulsive eating and not trusting your own body to know what it needs.

My turning point:

I was getting tired of the constant battle about food and my body. I have repeated the same cycle again and again. I would find a new plan thinking for sure that this time FOR SURE it would be the one to work for me. Maybe I would have results and peace for a while and then I would crash – binge again. Next I would have the same tired conversations with my friends complaining about how unfair it all was, that it didn’t work for me and why didn’t I have the body I wanted.

I thought I was the one that was broken, lazy and a failure. I just needed to find the right plan and buck up and stick with it. Even though it was this behavior that kept me stuck reliving the same patterns again and again.

While there are many moments that propelled me continually down the path of figuring out that what I was doing wasn’t working there is one that is very clear to me and its one I list as a big change point.

I was listening to a Geneen Roth course on her book Women, Food and God and heard her ask the question:

“How do you want to live your life?”

It felt like a powerful question to me. I paused the audio and sat and pondered the question a bit. Here is what I wrote:

Happy, open, free, joyful just being alive, peace with myself

Her second question is:

“How is that reflected in how I eat?”

Whoa. It was not. Eating was a battle and a constant source of misery. Not peaceful at all.

I committed to being different. My mantra is “Peace with myself.”

Putting that into practice through my eating has taken time and lots of practice. I also didn’t do it with out support. I had a good therapist to help ground and support me. She helped me learn deal with and face my emotions rather than avoiding and eating through them. I found some good groups, coaches and writers that supported finding peace, loving who you are and fueling yourself which included (but not exclusive to):

Tara Brach, a meditation teacher out of the Washington DC area who publishes weekly podcast talks around mindfulness, presences, and allowing for and being with what is. These talks, this teacher have helped me in so many ways I can’t even begin to describe.

Geneen Roth‘s work around the Eating Guidelines and compulsive eating and found a partner to explore that work with in our own lives.

Jill Coleman of Jillfit, who started out at as a figure competitor diet plan coach and has moved over the years to self development work and moderation in eating.

Go Kaleo and Sean Flanangan who helped return me to the path of science based thinking

Krissy Mae Cagney’s Flexible Dieting 2.0, which seem to fit with all of the other things that I was learning and made a lot of sense to me.

In conjunction with the peace and learning, I did tremendous amount of work on dropping any expectations of perfection around getting the food stuff “right”. It is about practice and progress, not perfection.

The path is not smooth or easy and there was a lot of emotion involved but it was so worth the journey. Peace with myself finally. <3

How do you want to live your life? How is the reflected in the way that you eat?